A Deep Dive into WP Essential

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Tens of thousands of users have made WordPress their site editor of choice on iPage, due to its flexibility and its endless array of themes and plugins. It doesn’t matter if you want to create a blog about your favorite restaurants, a full company website, or a photo gallery of your family--WordPress can make that happen. But, all that flexibility comes with a cost.

One of the most common things (and it might be the most common thing) we hear from our customers when they contact our support team is “How do I use WordPress?” WordPress is such a powerful tool that it can be overwhelming to set it up just the way you want it. It can becomplicated to just get in and update a page. It can be scary to add a new plugin and have to worry about whether or not it will break your theme.

Our team really wanted to help make WordPress accessible to everyone. We hoped to take away the complexity, make it easy for everyone—beginner or advanced—to use WordPress to build out the site they really want. It needed to be secure. And it needed to be fast. Really fast. We wanted to make sure that, whether you get 10 hits a day or 10,000, your site would stand up to the traffic and make you look good in front of your visitors.

To start, we’ve made it so your WordPress installs are the core of your control panel experience. Right when you log in, you’re presented your existing installs, with the ability to quickly log in to your site to add a new post, remove a site, or enable SiteLock security (more on that in a bit).

Need a new install? Just click the “add a site” button. We ask you a few questions, and in less than a minute, you’ll have a brand new site. Even better? Within the next week, you won’t need to remember your WordPress login info, as we’ve built a secure auto-login feature that will log you right into your WordPress site!

That part before where I said we wanted to make it easy? Each install comes with our pre-selected plugins to help make your site fast and full-featured. We’ve pre-selected themes that we think look great (and they’re all responsive, so they’ll look good on your iPhone, too). You don’t need to worry about looking for new plugins, or trying to hunt down a theme. We’ll take care of it for you.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more optional plugins and themes. Whether you want a shopping cart or the best email form, you won’t have to go digging to find the right plugins—we’ll be picking the best ones and making them available to you, with just a click.

(Are you WordPress savvy? WP Essential doesn’t restrict what you can do, like some other WordPress solutions. Don’t like our plugins? Pick your own.)

Fast

Our goal was to make WP Essential fast (I think I said “really fast”). Well, we’ve done some testing, and we’ve had some third parties do testing. You’re not going to find many WordPress hosts that can handle one thousand concurrent visitors without batting an eyelash. You’re not going to find many WordPress hosts that can scale up to millions of visitors a day. We’ve got you covered.

How do we make WP Essential so fast and scalable? WP Essential puts your WordPress site on a dedicated pool of servers ready to handle as much traffic as you can send them. Those servers are running a couple of technologies that can really make WordPress fly: nginx and Varnish. Combined with a plugin called W3 Total Cache, WP Essential ensures that the slow parts of WordPress only need to run once, and then they’re stored in memory where they can served up very, very quickly to subsequent visitors.

The end result? Your site loads really fast and can handle almost any amount of traffic, to support your biggest successes!

Dedicated Support

Have a question about a plugin? Just have a question about WordPress? You’ve got a dedicated phone line to our best WordPress support team. They’ve got the skills to help get you out of almost any WordPress jam.

Secure

WP Essential makes your WordPress site easy, and it makes it fast. Partnering with SiteLock, we make it secure. Each WP Essential plan comes with the ability to turn SiteLock on for your site. SiteLock will scan your site for vulnerabilities and malware. Even better, SiteLock gives your site a firewall to prevent new attacks from hitting you (and comes with the added benefit of a CDN to make your site even faster!)